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Lot Essay
Dating from a pivotal moment in Mark Rothko’s career, No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black] captures the flowering of the singular artistic vision that would come to define his oeuvre. Painted between 1950 and 1951, during one of Abstract Expressionism’s most rich and fertile creative periods, it is an early example of the iconic distilled color fields that would fuel the artist’s practice until his death in 1970. Upon a shimmering orange and yellow ground, two zones of deep saturated color vie for dominance: a vast swathe of opulent purple, overlaid by a jagged band of black. The hues shift and mutate within the viewer’s field of vision, transformed by the force of their companions; the backdrop glows like an otherworldly halo of light, pushing each field into dramatic relief. Unveiled in Rothko’s final exhibition with Betty Parsons in 1951, and subsequently included in the landmark group show 15 Americans at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1952, the work has since remained largely unseen in public, shown on just one other occasion in 1973. It bears witness to the birth of a language that stands today among the twentieth century’s most powerful explorations of human experience.
The year 1950 marked a significant milestone in Rothko’s output. Moving away from his early Surrealist-inspired practice, the artist began to simplify the compositional structure of his paintings in 1949, distilling the irregular patches of his first “Multiforms” to cleaner bands of color. By the time of the present work, Rothko had reduced the number of hovering rectangular fields to two or three, stacked on top of one another against a colored backdrop. This strategy, which would subsequently become synonymous with his oeuvre, brought about an important shift in his approach, allowing him to conceive his color fields as “actors” who played out the grand, sweeping polarities of human emotion. His subjects—“tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on”—were conveyed through the sheer drama of color and paint alone, allowing the dynamics of friction, tension and revelation to come into sharper and more visceral focus. “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point,” wrote Rothko in 1952, “will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer… To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood” (quoted in 15 Americans, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952, p. 18).
The present work captures the moment that this idea visibly beginning to take hold in Rothko’s output. As the title suggests, it stages a dialogue between “two dominants,” pitting intense, saturated hues in counterpoint. Rothko’s purple field shifts between red, blue and pink overtones, with dense passages of paint giving way to thin, translucent layers that blur to a delicate miasma at the edges. The black field cuts across its expanse with a sharp horizontal line, leaving—at the left hand side—a faint suggestion that the purple might continue beneath it. A bluish mauve hue quivers at the point of their interface, like a tide forged from the clash of opposing energies. The black itself appears to gravitate downwards, with strong vertical brushwork impelling it to loosen its grip upon the purple. In contrast to the layer above, its edges are deliberate and angular— fraying at the bottom like a swathe of velvet—while light dances across its charred contours in flickering formations. The source of this luminosity is revealed below, in the form of a vivid orange flame that threatens to incinerate the entire composition. As the eye scans the work’s glowing perimeter, it transforms from a portrait of darkness into one of searing light: the terror of the abyss becomes the warmth of salvation.
Rothko’s 1951 exhibition—his fifth and last with Parsons—marked the culmination of this transformative period. Since its founding in 1946, the gallery on East 57th Street had become a hub for Abstract Expressionism, extending the legacy of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. Parsons had showed Clyfford Still in 1947, Jackson Pollock in 1948 and Barnett Newman in 1950, as well as debuting Rothko’s “Multiforms” in 1949: she would come to refer to these artists her “four horsemen of the apocalypse." As David Anfam has written, “There was something apt about the fact that this was [Rothko’s] last show there, because it concluded what the first had begun—the trajectory of the work from its exploratory premises in the mid 1940s to a complete flowering by the end of 1950” (Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 71). Exhibited alongside the present work were paintings now held in major institutions, including No. 10, 1950 and No. 5/No. 22, 1950 (both held in The Museum of Modern Art, New York), as well as No. 15 (Untitled), 1951 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
The activity around Parsons’s gallery during this period was indicative of a broader phenomenon: namely, the gradual emergence of New York as the new center of the global art world. The present work takes its place within this context, situated against a backdrop of flourishing creative euphoria that set the stage for Abstract Expressionism’s growing international acclaim during the 1950s. Still had made his New York debut in 1946—the same year that the term Abstract Expressionism was coined by the critic Robert Coates—and by 1948 had established the pillars of his mature language. Pollock immersed himself in his drip paintings between 1947 and 1950, while Newman painted his first “zip” painting, Onement, I, in 1948. In 1949, Robert Motherwell inaugurated his Elegy for the Spanish Republic series; the following year, Willem de Kooning began his landmark suite of Women. The distillation of Rothko’s signature style during this period was thus part of a wider consolidation of various major strands of Abstract Expressionism, each seeking a transcendental purpose for painting in the wake of the Second World War. As Newman famously surmised, “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings” (“The Sublime is Now,” 1948, reproduced in H. B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, Los Angeles, 1984, p. 553).
The 1952 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art—part of a series in operation since 1929—bore witness to this momentum. Rothko showed eight works in a dedicated room, where the present painting took its place diagonally opposite No. 10, freshly acquired by the museum from the 1951 Betty Parsons exhibition. Major works by Clyfford Still were joined by masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, including his celebrated Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Number 7, 1950 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The exhibition was curated by Dorothy C. Miller, who would subsequently mastermind the museum’s seminal touring show The New American Painting in 1958. This historic group exhibition, which traveled to eight major European countries, radically transformed the perception of American art across the Atlantic, inspiring a host of young painters in its wake. The show featured many of the artists included in 15 Americans, among them Rothko himself, and was arguably indebted to the revelations of its 1952 predecessor.
The present work hints at some of the grounds upon which critics began to historicize Abstract Expressionism during this early period. The movement’s dematerialized approach to color and light prompted comparison with the late works of Claude Monet: an artist whose dramatic flaming sunsets and seemingly infinite bodies of water are invoked in the present work’s fiery, luminous depths. Others, notably the critic Robert Rosenblum, found ancestral links in the Romantic period, specifically in relation to the concept of the “sublime”. Where artists such as Caspar David Friedrich had sought to capture the overwhelming majesty of the natural world, Rothko and his contemporaries strove to induce the same intoxicating sensations through abstract color and form alone: the artist’s friend Murray Israel reported that “Rothko said that he wanted a presence, so when you turned your back to the painting, you would feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back” (quoted in J. E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, New York, 1993, p. 275). The artist’s fascination with the dialogue between “Apollonian” order and “Dionysian” chaos—informed by his readings of the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—is particularly palpable in the present work: the sensation of steady, illuminating warmth is held in tension with the looming, nocturnal shadow that threatens to engulf it.
Rothko’s use of light also owes much to his engagement with the work of the Old Masters: notably Rembrandt, whom he counted among his favorite artists. His juxtaposition of colors in the present work, and his fascination with the contrast between light and dark hues, evinces a deep awareness of chiaroscuro and the Dutch master’s modelling of three-dimensional space. The zones of color advance and recede as the viewer’s eye moves across the surface, bound together in a slow, sacred dance. Rothko was also drawn to the grand spiritual narratives contained within many Old Master works, and in 1950 had been captivated by Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the Convent of San Marco in Florence. Tellingly, a variation on the present work’s luxuriant purple tone would reappear in his own landmark suite of fresco-like paintings for the Houston Chapel in Texas, oscillating between strains of plum, maroon and black. The same mercurial spectrum dominated his Seagram Murals during the late 1950s, themselves inspired by the blind windows in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Interestingly, Francis Bacon’s contemporaneous series of Papal portraits, similarly forged in the light of the Old Masters, would also anchor themselves around the polarities of purple and black, their existential angst illuminated by piercing beams of light.
Despite his conscious rejection of figuration, many of Rothko’s works quiver with architectural hints of the human form. Much like Still’s jagged color fields or Newman’s “zips”—both of which flicker with traces of lone standing figures—his vertically-stacked bands harbor a curiously anthropomorphic quality. Still’s work, in particular, had an important impact on the evolution of Rothko’s mature language during the late 1940s: the present work’s black color field bears witness of this lineage, jutting into space in the manner of Still’s craggy terrains. Though both artists wholeheartedly embraced abstraction, their arrangements of color, shape and texture were fundamentally linked to human experience, mirroring the conflicts, resolutions, ambiguities and fluctuations that define our emotional response to the world. “I think of my pictures as dramas,” Rothko once said, “the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space” (quoted in “The Romantics were Prompted,” Possibilities No. 1, Winter 1947-1948). The present work captures the inception of this mysterious voyage into the void, marking the moment at which Rothko’s forms began to take on a life of their own.
The year 1950 marked a significant milestone in Rothko’s output. Moving away from his early Surrealist-inspired practice, the artist began to simplify the compositional structure of his paintings in 1949, distilling the irregular patches of his first “Multiforms” to cleaner bands of color. By the time of the present work, Rothko had reduced the number of hovering rectangular fields to two or three, stacked on top of one another against a colored backdrop. This strategy, which would subsequently become synonymous with his oeuvre, brought about an important shift in his approach, allowing him to conceive his color fields as “actors” who played out the grand, sweeping polarities of human emotion. His subjects—“tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on”—were conveyed through the sheer drama of color and paint alone, allowing the dynamics of friction, tension and revelation to come into sharper and more visceral focus. “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point,” wrote Rothko in 1952, “will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer… To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood” (quoted in 15 Americans, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952, p. 18).
The present work captures the moment that this idea visibly beginning to take hold in Rothko’s output. As the title suggests, it stages a dialogue between “two dominants,” pitting intense, saturated hues in counterpoint. Rothko’s purple field shifts between red, blue and pink overtones, with dense passages of paint giving way to thin, translucent layers that blur to a delicate miasma at the edges. The black field cuts across its expanse with a sharp horizontal line, leaving—at the left hand side—a faint suggestion that the purple might continue beneath it. A bluish mauve hue quivers at the point of their interface, like a tide forged from the clash of opposing energies. The black itself appears to gravitate downwards, with strong vertical brushwork impelling it to loosen its grip upon the purple. In contrast to the layer above, its edges are deliberate and angular— fraying at the bottom like a swathe of velvet—while light dances across its charred contours in flickering formations. The source of this luminosity is revealed below, in the form of a vivid orange flame that threatens to incinerate the entire composition. As the eye scans the work’s glowing perimeter, it transforms from a portrait of darkness into one of searing light: the terror of the abyss becomes the warmth of salvation.
Rothko’s 1951 exhibition—his fifth and last with Parsons—marked the culmination of this transformative period. Since its founding in 1946, the gallery on East 57th Street had become a hub for Abstract Expressionism, extending the legacy of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. Parsons had showed Clyfford Still in 1947, Jackson Pollock in 1948 and Barnett Newman in 1950, as well as debuting Rothko’s “Multiforms” in 1949: she would come to refer to these artists her “four horsemen of the apocalypse." As David Anfam has written, “There was something apt about the fact that this was [Rothko’s] last show there, because it concluded what the first had begun—the trajectory of the work from its exploratory premises in the mid 1940s to a complete flowering by the end of 1950” (Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas, New Haven and London, 1998, p. 71). Exhibited alongside the present work were paintings now held in major institutions, including No. 10, 1950 and No. 5/No. 22, 1950 (both held in The Museum of Modern Art, New York), as well as No. 15 (Untitled), 1951 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
The activity around Parsons’s gallery during this period was indicative of a broader phenomenon: namely, the gradual emergence of New York as the new center of the global art world. The present work takes its place within this context, situated against a backdrop of flourishing creative euphoria that set the stage for Abstract Expressionism’s growing international acclaim during the 1950s. Still had made his New York debut in 1946—the same year that the term Abstract Expressionism was coined by the critic Robert Coates—and by 1948 had established the pillars of his mature language. Pollock immersed himself in his drip paintings between 1947 and 1950, while Newman painted his first “zip” painting, Onement, I, in 1948. In 1949, Robert Motherwell inaugurated his Elegy for the Spanish Republic series; the following year, Willem de Kooning began his landmark suite of Women. The distillation of Rothko’s signature style during this period was thus part of a wider consolidation of various major strands of Abstract Expressionism, each seeking a transcendental purpose for painting in the wake of the Second World War. As Newman famously surmised, “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings” (“The Sublime is Now,” 1948, reproduced in H. B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art, Los Angeles, 1984, p. 553).
The 1952 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art—part of a series in operation since 1929—bore witness to this momentum. Rothko showed eight works in a dedicated room, where the present painting took its place diagonally opposite No. 10, freshly acquired by the museum from the 1951 Betty Parsons exhibition. Major works by Clyfford Still were joined by masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, including his celebrated Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Number 7, 1950 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). The exhibition was curated by Dorothy C. Miller, who would subsequently mastermind the museum’s seminal touring show The New American Painting in 1958. This historic group exhibition, which traveled to eight major European countries, radically transformed the perception of American art across the Atlantic, inspiring a host of young painters in its wake. The show featured many of the artists included in 15 Americans, among them Rothko himself, and was arguably indebted to the revelations of its 1952 predecessor.
The present work hints at some of the grounds upon which critics began to historicize Abstract Expressionism during this early period. The movement’s dematerialized approach to color and light prompted comparison with the late works of Claude Monet: an artist whose dramatic flaming sunsets and seemingly infinite bodies of water are invoked in the present work’s fiery, luminous depths. Others, notably the critic Robert Rosenblum, found ancestral links in the Romantic period, specifically in relation to the concept of the “sublime”. Where artists such as Caspar David Friedrich had sought to capture the overwhelming majesty of the natural world, Rothko and his contemporaries strove to induce the same intoxicating sensations through abstract color and form alone: the artist’s friend Murray Israel reported that “Rothko said that he wanted a presence, so when you turned your back to the painting, you would feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back” (quoted in J. E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, New York, 1993, p. 275). The artist’s fascination with the dialogue between “Apollonian” order and “Dionysian” chaos—informed by his readings of the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—is particularly palpable in the present work: the sensation of steady, illuminating warmth is held in tension with the looming, nocturnal shadow that threatens to engulf it.
Rothko’s use of light also owes much to his engagement with the work of the Old Masters: notably Rembrandt, whom he counted among his favorite artists. His juxtaposition of colors in the present work, and his fascination with the contrast between light and dark hues, evinces a deep awareness of chiaroscuro and the Dutch master’s modelling of three-dimensional space. The zones of color advance and recede as the viewer’s eye moves across the surface, bound together in a slow, sacred dance. Rothko was also drawn to the grand spiritual narratives contained within many Old Master works, and in 1950 had been captivated by Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the Convent of San Marco in Florence. Tellingly, a variation on the present work’s luxuriant purple tone would reappear in his own landmark suite of fresco-like paintings for the Houston Chapel in Texas, oscillating between strains of plum, maroon and black. The same mercurial spectrum dominated his Seagram Murals during the late 1950s, themselves inspired by the blind windows in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. Interestingly, Francis Bacon’s contemporaneous series of Papal portraits, similarly forged in the light of the Old Masters, would also anchor themselves around the polarities of purple and black, their existential angst illuminated by piercing beams of light.
Despite his conscious rejection of figuration, many of Rothko’s works quiver with architectural hints of the human form. Much like Still’s jagged color fields or Newman’s “zips”—both of which flicker with traces of lone standing figures—his vertically-stacked bands harbor a curiously anthropomorphic quality. Still’s work, in particular, had an important impact on the evolution of Rothko’s mature language during the late 1940s: the present work’s black color field bears witness of this lineage, jutting into space in the manner of Still’s craggy terrains. Though both artists wholeheartedly embraced abstraction, their arrangements of color, shape and texture were fundamentally linked to human experience, mirroring the conflicts, resolutions, ambiguities and fluctuations that define our emotional response to the world. “I think of my pictures as dramas,” Rothko once said, “the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space” (quoted in “The Romantics were Prompted,” Possibilities No. 1, Winter 1947-1948). The present work captures the inception of this mysterious voyage into the void, marking the moment at which Rothko’s forms began to take on a life of their own.